Technical Abstract:
The SIT is a biological control technique where sexually sterile flies are released to mate with wild flies. These matings yield no offspring. A Mexican fruit fly (MxFF) rearing facility is located at Mission, TX and is capable of rearing 80 million sterile flies each week. Rearing insects in large numbers over long periods of time often results in the generation of undesirable traits caused by genetic drift or colony loss through disease or mechanical failures. To eliminate these and other problems associated with insect propagation, storage of insects at some subambient temperature has often been attempted and has resulted in varying success. Embryo cryopreservation was accomplished with Drosophila melanogaster by Mazur et al. (1992) & Steponkus and Caldwell (1993). Recently, capabilities for embryo cryopreservation has been extended to other species including Musca domestica , Cochliomyia hominivorax and certain tephritids. This presentation shows our progress on designing a protocol for cryopreserving MxFF embryos for the purpose of storing back-up colonies for mass-rearing and alleviating the need for continuous propagation of genetic strains used in research.